Gifford made The Pursued (1947) in response to Picasso's Guernica. Set to flamenco music, it was performed last week by students Sophia Gutierrez and G. Ben Fred on BU's "Aurora Borealis 8" program in the BCA's Roberts Studio Theater. A woman stares and lunges out into space, falls to her knees and stretches back, steps and searches, seeing something we can't. A man appears, leaping and lunging, dancing with the same kind of wariness. Side by side they step forward, then back, then forward, their heads turning together to look for whatever may be in the distance. They cover a lot of space when they move, but they don't seem to get anywhere. Inevitably, they'll be caught.

Review: Tír Na Theatre Company's Trad The fiddler’s on the ground floor in Trad , but Tevye would nonetheless identify with the play’s history-bound patriarch — though compared with this venerable coot, Sholem Aleichem’s beleaguered dairyman is a spring chicken.

Review: Date Night Must-see-TV leads Steve Carell ( The Office ) and Tina Fey ( 30 Rock ) team up in this night-out-gone-wrong comedy as a bored Jersey couple seeking to put some romance back into their marriage.

Happy returns George Balanchine didn’t go in for productions of the old classic ballets.

Molten metal Let’s cut to the chase — metal is back. And not just as a popular musical style, but as a subculture, freely seeping into the mainstream in a variety of strange ways, from the bullet belts you see on a dance floor to the devil horns being thrown by everybody and your uncle’s band.

Hustle and flow M-Dot is live on Brookline Ave, chopping it up with nurses, businessmen, and co-eds.

Ye gods! Much beautiful music turns up in the 18th-century operatic form that’s probably most alien to a modern audience.

Talking ’bout a revolution It takes a theatrical genius like Tom Stoppard to come up with Rock ’n’ Roll, which merges the pulsing spirit of both until they feel like one. And it takes a theater of the caliber of the Gamm to make history feel like a Stones concert that becomes a political rally.

Theme and variations George Balanchine was famous for “non-story” ballets, but when you put three of his works — the usual number to fill up an evening — together, you always get some kind of narrative.

Blythe spirit Leaving the Cutler Majestic after the opening night of Opera Boston’s latest Offenbach, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein , you could see the smiling faces of an audience that had had a good time.

JOFFREY BALLET GETS ITS DUE | May 08, 2012 New York has two great ballet companies, New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater. Any other ballet troupe that wants to put down roots there has to develop a personality that's distinct from those two.

THE BOSTON BALLET’S DON QUIXOTE | May 01, 2012 In the long string of ballet productions extracted from Miguel de Cervantes's novel Don Quixote, the delusional Don has become a minor character, charging into situations where he shouldn't go and causing trouble instead of good works.